Fucking with game mechanics like they're going to do will have bugs AND ridiculous imbalances.

The item squish will REDUCE the ridiculous imbalances between low and high level content. This is a GOOD THING.

The garment rending over this issue has gone way beyond the bounds of sanity. It's incredibly ridiculous, even by the standards of gaming QQ.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.

A single message has more bytes than 6-7 variables. How many messages are there per sec?

In combat, 25 people will potentially be performing multiple actions per second (especially with dots, hots, cleaves, and AoE effects.) Anything involving healing or damage will require expansion of the data format unless a squish occurs. Each individual act of damage/healing from one entity to another will involve a separate chunk of data. You will notice recent tuning where they've been reformulating spells to do a smaller number of actions, each with a larger effect? It's because they're up against performance limits.

There must also be a constant stream of packets reporting the changes in position of each character, although that's not affected by the squish.

"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"Almost every time I have gotten to know a critic personally, they keep up with the criticism but lose the venom." -- Ghostcrawler
I hate these casual Fridays ruining it for real Fridays.

I don't know why I always want to follow stat squish threads. Everyone always argues over the same boring parts, on what a stat squish can do now, or how a stat squish can go wrong.

No one seems to discuss how to make a stat squish go right if it were to happen.

My belief is that there are two main things to consider:
1) Player stats should grow less exponentially
2) Players should still grow exponentially compared to enemies

If we don't do #1, squishing is a weak bandaid fix. We could cut everything by 90% and then still do 150k DPS by the end of next expansion (so we might need another squish), and low levels would be strange.
If we don't do #2, everyone who does old content gets nerfed.

Anyone care to find solutions to address both of these at the same time? You'll probably have to get creative.

In combat, 25 people will potentially be performing multiple actions per second (especially with dots, hots, cleaves, and AoE effects.) Anything involving healing or damage will require expansion of the data format unless a squish occurs. Each individual act of damage/healing from one entity to another will involve a separate chunk of data. You will notice recent tuning where they've been reformulating spells to do a smaller number of actions, each with a larger effect? It's because they're up against performance limits.

There must also be a constant stream of packets reporting the changes in position of each character, although that's not affected by the squish.

This is the thing you don't understand, the only thing that would have its data type changed would be the HP, nothing else.

This is the thing you don't understand, the only thing that would have its data type changed would be the HP, nothing else.

You are acting like HP uses 80% of WoW's bandwidth.

Now, I'm not sure in what language WoW is coded in, but I'm fairly sure ALL damage numbers would need to be converted to 64 bit int at some point in the server calculations. Even if the damage values fit within 32 bit integers.

Now, I'm not sure in what language WoW is coded in, but I'm fairly sure ALL damage numbers would need to be converted to 64 bit int at some point in the server calculations. Even if the damage values fit within 32 bit integers.

What's the highest damage that you have ever seen? Let's say 5 million.

Still far far away from the overflow for a 32 signed integer. No, if they fit perfectly, why would you change it?

I enjoyed easily readable numbers. Doesn't matter, It's all % based so everything will remain the same. learn to math.

You should do this yourself. And while you're at it learn to think.

What happens if you take 30% off a level 1? They end up with stats that are .005 doing .012 damage to an enemy with .79 hp. Still sound good? Is it still an easily readable number because I certainly don't think so.

If they go through with this, and with the need to cater to the more casual crowd a little more with each expansion, they may as well do it seriously, but if I'm not over 1m hp and 500k dps when Sargeras rolls around, then they will have failed.

What happens if you take 30% off a level 1? They end up with stats that are .005 doing .012 damage to an enemy with .79 hp. Still sound good? Is it still an easily readable number because I certainly don't think so.

Okay, how many times do I have to tell you that 1-60 keeps it's linear progression?

- - - Updated - - -

Originally Posted by Thyranne

It's definitly (spelling?) C++.

Because:

There are already a lot of stuffs done in C++ for games.

Most games are developed in C++ so it's easier to find people to work.

Access I/O.

Memory management.

Easy to put in another platforms.

If you need an optimized code you can write an optimized code in assembly.

Easy to access the hardware.

Actually I really can't imagine another language to use if you wanna develop a serious game for Windows (maybe Pascal?).

It's probably C++, I agree. But I'm no expert in any C language. It's all conjecture.

My character is not going to become significantly weaker in proportion to other players and NPCs. Numbers will become more manageable.

The exponential scaling in this game is getting out of hand. 1 mil+ health on player characters is ridiculous when you start with a few hundred.

Each expansion is going to keep its linear progression, it's just going to be that the exponential increase from outdated tiers is essentially going to be pruned. Players levels 1-59 should see no change whatsoever, I would expect.

What happens if you take 30% off a level 1? They end up with stats that are .005 doing .012 damage to an enemy with .79 hp. Still sound good? Is it still an easily readable number because I certainly don't think so.

Honestly do people genuinely think things like this are going to happen?

Or is it just mindless scare mongering by people who look for an excuse to get angry at blizzard or the game.

Same as people STILL bringing up "I can't solo old content" when Blizz said the major thing they wanted to not affect was going back to do old content

This is the part that gets me. No matter how many times you explain the laws of mathematics to people, irreverent of the 10 years of history of Blizzard fucking up simple, simple things, these willfully ignorant people will defend to the "item squish" to the bitter end.

You're confusing mathematics with statistics. They are not the same thing.

The idea is that item levels don't need to increase (as much, if at all) between raid tiers of previous expansions. So, for example, you'd go from 200->220 when switching from wrath to cata instead of 200->272. I'd go from being multiple hundreds of ilvl above a lvl 80 mob to being probably 50-100 or so above it, and from that it's going to be massively more powerful compared to me than it was before. Of course, for a normal quest mob that'd just mean it might not die to a single melee swing, but the point still remains that the power jump from lvl 80 to lvl 90 (or anything after lvl 60, really) gets smaller.

And on a final note, future expansions after the squish would still have the huge ilvl jumps between tiers because Blizz likes that design: it's fun to get noticeably more powerful while raiding. So don't expect this to fix anything like 2 items capping your hit, crit capping, etc. Those'll all happen just the same.

Your example still doesn't address the fact that they've said they would be adjusting stats of mobs as well, though.

And where is the Blizzard post detailing how exactly the stat squish will go into place, since you're stating "that isn't what's happening"? I haven't seen the graph and apparent post people are referring to that Blizzard apparently released detailing how they will go about doing this.

"There is good and evil in this world; we must find the black and white in the gray."

Your example still doesn't address the fact that they've said they would be adjusting stats of mobs as well, though.

And where is the Blizzard post detailing how exactly the stat squish will go into place, since you're stating "that isn't what's happening"? I haven't seen the graph and apparent post people are referring to that Blizzard apparently released detailing how they will go about doing this.